Anyone who knows me on a personal level clearly knows that I love the Michigan Wolverines. But out of all the sports that really brings out the fanatic in me, is their football program. And this year, The Michigan Wolverine's Football is at the top of the mountain. With their most recent win against Alabama Crimson Tide to get to the College National Championship which is set for next Monday in Houston. To say that I am excited for this opportunity to watch Michigan truly be at the mountaintop, I just never thought I would see it in my lifetime.
Michigan has a saying that reaches well past football: "Those who stay will be champions." For me it's all about staying the course, even in extreme adversity.
It comes from Bo Schembechler, who coached Michigan from 1969 to 1989. He put it on a sign in the locker room in his first season, 1969, after a brutal preseason had already driven players to quit. And it was a promise, a specific one: stay four years and you will leave here with a championship. The part I find hard to get over is that he kept it. Every player who stayed four years under Bo left Michigan with at least a share of a Big Ten title.
What gets me is the order of it. He didn't tell them to go be champions. He told them to stay, and said the rest would follow.
I like that it's a low bar and an impossibly high one at the same time. Anybody can stay. Almost nobody does.
This saying harkens back to one of my favorite books on personal growth by Angela Duckworth. The book being Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Because I have always thought that Grit has been one of my greatest strengths in my own life. I was never the smartest in the boardroom, or the classroom, or even sometimes the living room. But what I always knew, that in a crowded field, I could outwork and outlast most regular individuals.
Duckworth's argument is that grit beats talent over a long enough stretch, and that it's passion and perseverance together, not either one alone. Talent gets you noticed. Staying is what gets you there.
Nothing I've built happened quickly. Not one thing. Every business I've run took longer than I thought it would and asked more of me than I planned for, and the only reason any of it worked is that I was still there after the people who started alongside me had moved on.
I am elated in the fact that I get to witness one of Michigan's greatest teams of all time, or even Michigan's greatest football team of all time. If they win the national championship next Monday, I believe they cement themselves as such. Outside of the game, I take this mantra with me even outside of the football field. Staying the course is what it means to me, the power of passion and perseverance despite the challenges and hardships of life itself. It empowers me to be a better me each and every day.
Go Blue!
